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What is the reason for the need to give discard reasons for old, abandoned drafts? When I tried to participate in the Discard Project, I was shot down for not including discard reasons, but nobody has really explained why they are required.
Also, don't you (and others) participate in the Outdated Pages thread? I thought the inclusion of this new "rule" on TLP Guidelines came from that thread. I bring this up because who else is better suited to explain why we have this "rule" than the people who added it to the guidelines.
Personally, I don't see a reason to require giving discard reasons unless it's a new or troublesome draft.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
^ It's a transparency issue. This way people will know the draft was discarded by consensus, if they see it and think it has potential they can come and talk to us about it, and if the draft is linked elsewhere (say, the Salvage Yard), having a reason why the original one was discarded will help people to not just immediately try and use the older draft.
We gave you reasons when you asked.
Even if you disagree they're needed, Basara is still outright ignoring us. They aren't posting to say "hey, they're not required", they're not asking us why, they're not explaining themselves. They're refusing to even engage in the conversation we keep trying to have with them about it.
As for saying you were "shot down", that's making us sound far more aggressive than we were. I asked politely for you to leave reasons and then people gave reasons why you should leave reasons. That's all that happened.
Edited by WarJay77 Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Leaving edit reasons is a common courtesy when editing and actually required if you remove content from the wiki, like if you want to remove an example (e.g because you are convinced it's misuse and not a valid example; because it's listed twice or because you think it's a flame bait).
Discarding TLP drafts is the same. Removing content. To one person, it may be perfectly clear why it's discard-worthy: it's old, untouched for years, duplicate of existing trope, low/zero effort, or misplaced trope finder questions.
See, people don't have crystal balls and are not psychics. What's horrible and discard-worthy to one can be "wow, this is potentially tropeworthy, how come no one noticed this pattern yet; someone should adopt this draft" to another.
Hitting the discard button takes one second and you need another second to confirm the action. Taking five more seconds to write a short message with a proper discard reason should not be that difficult. Especially considering it's removing content. It's something that can be lost and not recovered.
I should also make it clear that I'm not going after them solely for not doing what the rest of us want. It's because they're refusing to even respond; they're clearly reading the thread, but they refuse to engage and keep ignoring our polite requests for them to use discard reasons. That's the issue.
If, say, they were just discarding any old draft, I wouldn't consider it an issue. But if they're doing it as part of the project, it's very helpful to let people know that the discard project had taken a look at the draft beforehand, even if just to ward of potential "rogue discarding" accusations.
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Has anyone tried to PM them directly, given that pinging doesn't work?
I haven't, though for my part I'm just not one for confronting someone over PM and thought that they'd have seen the posts on the thread anyway. Blame shyness and wanting things to be public whenever possible.
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
I've PM'ed them simply to notify them of this query.
Personally, I'm also bothered by how they don't just discard abandoned drafts without an edit reason, but also discard drafts with recent activity without participating in discussion. Even if these drafts aren't in good shape by TLP standards, it doesn't seem right to me to discard an active sponsor's draft.
Sorry guys, I'm not active in the forum so I don't know about the decisions you made here, I know this project exists but it's not my intention to put a foot on you. Yes, usually I got the drafts by lurking and see how many bombs they have. I usually discard those ones who were already cemented that aren't going anywhere, so an explanation by my side is useless, but those ones that are marked to be saved I leave them behind.
Again, sorry for discarding without say something, but as I said, I don't read the forum (rarely I do as in this ocasion), I prefer to just edit pages and tropes, as well being on TLP giving ideas for drafts, giving hats and bombs, and sometimes making my own drafts.
I didn't really get a chance to respond to this thread yesterday, but thank you Xfllo for explaining it better. The "transparency" thing isn't as sound a reason as the "removing anything" reason.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
^^ Usually you can just use the reason the rest of us in the thread had bombed it when it was taken to the thread in the first place, or even just say that it was "discarded with thread consensus" if you got nothing else.
But I guess I did overestimate how much you lurk there, it seemed frequent to me but maybe it wasn't frequent enough for you to see a few posts scattered across a relatively big thread, so I shouldn't have assumed we were being ignored.
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Basara-Kun, who I can't easily link to or ping due to their username, keeps discarding drafts brought up at the Discard Project thread
. That's not the issue; that's a good thing, the entire point of the project.
But they refuse to leave discard reasons. I've asked them multiple times to do so and I'm not the only one who has. They're clearly reading the thread because they've been discarding the exact drafts we've been discussing and we don't bump them, so the only possible way they could do it is by lurking. So despite being on the thread often enough to see the drafts we're discussing and lend a hand in discarding them, they somehow keep missing our posts that ask them to leave discard reasons.
Yeah, it's more likely we're being ignored.
Discarding without reason isn't the end of the world, I know this; but it was a recently added note on the TLP Guidelines specifically because we're trying to encourage transparency and common courtesy, and we've also made it one of our project rules (again, to encourage transparency). So the fact that they're refusing to acknowledge any of this is...troubling, and it's happened enough times to warrant saying something about it.